Nashville, Tenn.-based iPayment Inc., a publicly held independent sales organization processing for 125,000 small merchants, reported strong results for the fourth quarter of last year and for all of 2004, driven mainly by increased economies of scale from merchant-portfolio acquisitions. Revenue jumped to $101.4 million for the quarter and $364.2 …

Boston-based Vayusa Inc., which markets its m-commerce service under the name MobileLime, has had discussions with a national retailer and restaurant chain about offering its m-commerce network nationally. If successful, the deals could pave the way for MobileLime to reach the 172 million or so mobile users in the U.S. …

The ATM Exchange, a supplier of ATM parts and service, will begin selling next month a retrofit product for older ATMs that upgrades them to run on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. The product, called 3DES Plus XP, also renders ATMs compliant with so-called triple-DES encryption requirements laid down by …

The advent of ATMs running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system is making it easier for banks, retailers, and other machine deployers to add revenue-generating features to the machines, including advertising. PNC Corp., a Pittsburgh-based bank, has found success in introducing advertising and couponing capability as it swaps out older ATMs …

Add-on pricing as well as an increase in manual items kept the fees banks and independent sales organizations pay to processors from dropping in 2004, according to a new acquirer-pricing study released today. Although most observers thought processor fees might decline somewhat last year as a result of the emergence …

Card issuers' uncertainties surrounding such issues as prepaid debit, debit card fraud, and the future flow of interchange income have led a major ATM industry trade group to form a new organization to represent issuers' interests. The Debit Council of the ATM Industry Association held its first meeting today at …

The booming market for mobile games is set to overtake that for ring tones as the largest digital-content market in m-commerce, with carrier-based billing remaining the dominant payment model for the foreseeable future. According to the most conservative projection offered by experts speaking this week at a conference on the …

Any signature-based debit card product that banks in the Pulse electronic funds transfer network may issue with Discover Financial Services Inc. will most likely offer interchange income equal to what they earn on Visa and MasterCard signature debit, the top executive at Pulse says. “Any [signature-debit] fees will have to …

Visa USA reported yesterday its total dollar volume in 2004 reached $1.3 trillion, up 17.9% from the previous year. Total sales volume, or dollars on Visa products at the point of sale, hit $1.045 trillion, an increase of 19.1%, the San Francisco-based bank card network says. All Visa-branded cards in …

Prepaid wireless service is surging in the U.S in large part because of the efforts of so-called mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), which re-sell airtime from the major wireless networks, experts said at an industry conference yesterday. Indeed, the prepaid wireless market in the U.S., counting both airtime and carriers' …